The facility brings together the GGE Environmental Change research group, providing new capacity in the UK for ice core and water research, driven by the need to understand bio-markers within the polar ecosystem that can inform on multiple questions, including global ocean and atmospheric circulation change, sea ice variability and anthropogenic forcing of polar ecological change.

The laboratory consists of sealed ice storage, preparation and analysis rooms, which house several dedicated -20C cold room preparation facilities and instruments funded by The Faculty of Natural Sciences, Keele University and GGE.

Florescence analysis in water samples is provided by a Horiba Scientific Aqualog-UV-800-C. Its unique design makes it ideal, being both a high performance research grade spectrometer with a 150W ozone Xe source, that is transportable and field proven. Preliminary studies have demonstrated a clear signal from this technique even in ancient Antarctic ice collected as a part of our Australian Research Council Linkage Project with our partners Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions (http://ellsworthmountains.com/the-ellsworth-mountains.html).

The use of the instrument represents a new direction in Antarctic ice and water research, driven by the need to understand bio-markers in Antarctica that can inform on global circulation change, sea ice extent and ecological change (Figure 1). Preliminary studies have demonstrated a clear signal from this technique even in ancient ice.